A couple of years ago I saw a video of Amexxxxx Airlines. I believe it was the Chiefpilot that times who was making an interesting statement about investigations of accidents/incidents reports. He said, that especially pilots from Overseas (e.g. Europe) tend to rely in case of an emergency or system malfunction on automatic systems, rather than on flying skills. Maybe caused by a in general very uncritical attitude towards automatism.
That was not ment as a judgement, it was rather an observation. It is interesting to see, that it is even reflected here in this particular forum. I am from Europe, too...
And to Frederic and AhhhVC813: there have been cases, where pilots saved the day, by going beyond design limitations. I heard of a starlifter, which lost 2 engines while manouvering in the mountains of ex-yugoslavia. He overboosted the remaining engines. After landing he replied to the question, why he firewalled (and so ruined) 2 good engines, with '...because I couldn't forward them even further !' He obviously needed more than the maximum rated thrust of the engine, and the engine was able to do so - and saved his butt !
Another case was a TriStar, which had a stucked stabilizer, causing the ac going into a normally uncontrollable nose-up attitude. The pilot recovered by constantly banking the ac heavily to one side to another, to lower the lift component, until the situation was under control.
About Formula 1... Ask Coulthard and Hakkinen what they thought about their electronics when they were stucked on the grid-line a couple of times.....